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Dwight Owen Coons, Deputy Medical Director, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston1

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Dwight Owen Coons, Deputy Medical Director, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston1 CANADA’S SPACE MEDICINE PIONEERS: OWEN COONS By Lydia Dotto The 1960s—Tragedy and Triumphs in Space We didn’t know what was wrong, but it was an eerie quiet that wasn’t natural, and we were all very concerned at the Control Center. Just a few minutes later— it seemed like an eternity—Guenter Wendt, who was the pad leader, came up on the emergency communications system just screaming. His voice was about two octaves above normal and just yelling, “Oh, my God, Oh, my God! It’s terrible, it’s terrible! Oh, my God!” - Dwight Owen Coons, deputy medical director, NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston1 At 6:31 p.m. on January 27, 1967, Dwight Owen Coons, sitting at a medical console in Mission Control, was about to get the worst possible news that a NASA flight surgeon could hear: fire had broken out in the Apollo command module being tested on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center and the three astronauts who were slated to fly the first Apollo mission—Virgil (Gus) Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee—had been trapped inside. The crew never had a chance; the fire burned furiously in the 100% oxygen atmosphere of the spacecraft and the astronauts were unable to open the hatch fast enough to save themselves. It was all over in minutes— Apollo 1 mission patch. Image: NASA. the first, and one of the worst, tragedies of the U.S. space program. For Coons, a former Canadian military doctor, it was the grimmest day of his six-year tenure with NASA, then a fledgling organization struggling to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to reach the moon before the end of the decade. A pioneer in operational space medicine, Coons was directly involved in overseeing the health and safety of America’s first astronauts as they were first learning how to live and work in space. He had a front-row seat for the early triumphs as well, such as the first spacewalk by an American astronaut. As deputy medical director of the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center) in Houston, he was a key member of the NASA team during the Gemini and Apollo programs until he left in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon. Consumed 1 The interview on which this article is based is from NASA’s Johnson Space Centre History Collection “Great Moments in Space Medicine” series. Done in 1986, it was one of a series of interviews with NASA doctors and medical experts. 1 by the demands of the punishing flight schedule, he once commented: “We tend to remember our lives, date our lives, by the flight. Not by the calendar, but by the flight.” Military Doctor Born in Hamilton, Ont., in 1925, Coons graduated from the University of Toronto medical school and joined what was then the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) as a flight surgeon. He became interested in space medicine before it really even existed as a medical discipline. As early as 1951—a decade before the first human would fly in space—he attended a conference in Texas that focused on the physiological consequences of flying to the highest reaches of the earth’s atmosphere. At the time, he was interested in medical issues related to pilots trying to escape from a new generation of high-flying aircraft. “I had been working on high-altitude and high-speed escape, ejection seats, and cabin pressurization systems,” he said. “We all knew that we had some real problems about getting out of our new high performance aircraft—what we called high performance at that time. We were concerned about the safety of the pilots and their survivability in the event of cabin pressure loss or the loss of their vehicle. We were concerned…how they would get to the ground alive.” Former Deputy Medical Director at the It was not surprising, therefore, that he was NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, Dwight Owen Coons. DND Photo #PL 2728. intrigued by talk within the aviation medical community about the possibility that humans could fly into space. Though the talk was still “very conjectural”—this was even before the first satellite, Sputnik, was launched—he viewed the people who were doing the conjecturing as farsighted and he eagerly sought out opportunities to meet with them, to learn what they were doing and to share with them the results of aeromedical research being done in Canada. He had every intention of remaining in the Canadian military. “I had no thought that I would ever wind up in the space program, nor had I a thought of coming to the States for any reasons other than medical liaison work.” He described himself as a “grassroots, field-type flight surgeon. I worked with the air crews out on the line, and I worked with some of the people who were trying to design our new aircraft, to help them on the physiological and human factors design.” He described himself as their ferret. “They had problems; they had questions; they wanted to know what’s going on. I’d go out and find what was going on and come back and tell them.” After a period of overseas duty in Europe with a wing of F-86 fighter pilots, his boss, Director General Medical Services Gordon Corbet, encouraged him to become a specialist in aviation medicine. As a result, in 1955, the Canadian government sent him to Harvard University to get a Masters degree in Public Health. It was at Harvard that he had a fateful meeting with US Air Force flight surgeon Charles (Chuck) Berry, who would later become NASA’s medical director of manned space flight. “Chuck Berry and I lived near each other out west of Boston,” 2 said Coons. “We car-pooled together and our families picnicked together and we got to know each other quite well.” Owen Coons checks over a young patient, February 1953. DND Photo # PL-62796. After a year at Harvard, Coons returned to Canada and began working at RCAF headquarters in Ottawa on projects related to aviation medicine; flight safety, including accident investigation and prevention, and human factors in the design and development of new aircraft. Three years later, he was posted to Washington, D.C. as a member of the Canadian Joint Staff, a military office in the Canadian embassy. “It was a really choice job and I was delighted because it was giving me an opportunity to pursue this work of following aviation medical research from the States and reporting back to Canada.” Coincidentally—and much to his surprise—Coons discovered that Chuck Berry had also been sent to work in Washington, where he became Coons’ primary contact in the Office of the Air Force Surgeon General. The U.S. space program was just gearing up in the late 1950s and Canadian military officials were aware that many of the doctors working in the program were being borrowed from the military. They asked Coons to investigate opportunities for Canada to participate. “Our Director General felt that it would be appropriate to have some Canadians have an opportunity to go in and help like the American Armed Forces medical officers were doing, to try to keep up with the program,” said Coons. He prepared a report identifying potential roles for two Canadian medical officers in the space program. Unfortunately, he was told that Canada didn’t have anyone to fill those slots at the time, that “we’d just keep it in mind and if we had someone, we would approach them again and see if they had a need.” When he met with General Charles Roadman, who was head of NASA’s medical operations at the time, to tell him this news, Roadman surprised him by asking if he would consider coming to work for NASA. Coons said he hadn’t even considered the idea; he was planning to make his career in the RCAF and, in fact, was about to be re-assigned back to 3 Canada. He was not overly happy about the assignment, however, because he was slated to do a tour of duty with the Canadian Navy. At the time, Canada was unifying the three branches of its armed forces—the Army, Navy and Air Force—and the process had started with the doctors and chaplains. “We had already unified the Medical Services of all three armed forces into one medical service,” Coons said. “The idea was to make a better career for physicians and it was a step toward unifying all the armed forces, which they eventually did.” Coons wasn’t enthusiastic about unifying the Medical Services, believing it would distance him from the pilots he was caring for. “I had gotten to know a lot of very fine pilots and I felt a kinship with them; I was their doctor and I hated to be sequestered from them, taken away from them.” Roadman’s offer of a NASA job intrigued him, not just because of his disenchantment with the prospect of unification, but also because it was “a unique opportunity to do something really new and different.” On the other hand, the fact that he was being sent to the Navy meant that he was being groomed for advancement. He believed he was on track to eventually become the Surgeon General of the Canadian forces and “we all sort of tacitly understood that I had to get cross-serviced…so that when it became my turn to take the responsibility of the Surgeon General, I’d be prepared.
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